I have actually already begun the tedius process of replacing the here document constructs with q() in all of my scripts. I was just wondering why in this particular script I was running into probs. With regard to your testing i can narrow the entire script down to just that block I showed before and the basic HTML tags and I still get warnings. I looked at the HTML::Template, and would surely use it if I could. I only have two weeks left on the project, and I need to get all 70 + scripts updated to DBI and CGI::simple first. I am currently in the process of adding "use strict" and "use warnings" to every script which is how I ran into this problem in the first place.